


Shadow-boxed

by dawittiest



Category: Marvel 616
Genre: Canon Memory Loss, Character Study, F/F, Internalized Homophobia, Introspection, Realizations, The Enemy Within Fallout, Unresolved Sexual Tension, canon-typical shitty backstories, mentions of Veranke
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-10
Updated: 2018-09-10
Packaged: 2019-07-06 03:16:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15877383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dawittiest/pseuds/dawittiest
Summary: They’re on a stakeout and she’s trapped with Carol in a 6 x 10 room and Carol’s stuck with her, and this is the exact wrong moment for the awaking of latent lesbian urges. Jessica’s used to her body going out of wack on her and the way it usually backfires on others, but this is a new brand of personal hell.





	Shadow-boxed

**Author's Note:**

> Jessica is sad, Carol doesn’t remember anything. They don’t deal with it. Unresolved sexual tension stays unresolved.
> 
> Written for [Carol/Jess Mini Bang](https://caroljessshipevents.tumblr.com/), with an amazing illustration from jayjayverse ([check it out](https://jayjayverse.tumblr.com/day/2018/09/10/))!
> 
> Thanks to Ironlawyer for all the kind words and beta <3

The whole space is maybe 6 feet long and 10 feet wide. Enough to fit a lousy double mattress pushed all the way to the wall and leave – sparse – legroom. Barely enough to accommodate two grown-ass people. Not nearly enough to keep playing the avoidance game.

That’s just her rotten luck.

Carol drops her duffel bag on the mattress and stretches her arms over her head. Something pops in her spine.

“Guess we’ll be here for a while,” she says, mouth curled with a shadow of her mischievous smile.

Jess swallows a sudden fist lodged in her throat.

“Might as well try to get comfortable,” she says, because that’s what people usually say there. That’s what people who don’t have anything else to say to each other say.

Carol shakes off her worn, trusted aviator jacket and goes about setting up the surveillance equipment. A stubborn hair falls between the arches of her eyebrows and Carol blows it away mindlessly, a remote gesture. Jess sits at the far edge of the mattress, ankles crossed, and digs her nails into the soft skin under the bone. She should probably help out, she knows her spy gizmos maybe even better than Carol does, but she doesn’t trust herself, so close to Carol and one word away from saying the wrong thing. Carol’s doing good on her own. Carol’s doing _good_ and it’s Jess who’s useless and falling apart.

When she met Carol for the first time, Carol was plummeting down from the Golden Gate Bridge into cold deep water. Lowest you can get; it’s only later she learned about Marcus, about what the Avengers had done to her. Jess… Jess knows what’s it like to have someone take you and use you – she likes to think her and Carol, they’d find the way to each other anyway, but at the time what made her take Carol’s hand and think _you’re_ _my people_ , was what she thought was their shared trauma they had bringing them together. She didn’t think much about what Rogue had done to Carol. Not back then.

Jess closes her eyes, letting the buzzing white noise of Carol bustling around wash over her, and thinks about how it felt for Carol then, floating alone, tethered to nothing and no one. How did it feel to remember her mother, her dead brother, go through all those sun-scented memories, again and again, searching for any emotion in her and finding nothing. A sinking belly feeling like missing a step on the stairs in your childhood home.

Maybe it’s better like this, Jess thinks. Now that Carol doesn’t remember anything – a blank slate, no murky waters of a life past to navigate. Maybe that’s why Carol seems fine; more than fine, she’s doing great. Jessica wishes she was big enough to take that blessing.

Carol and Wanda, they used to be close. How did it feel for Wanda then, when Carol lost the memory of their feelings of friendship for the first time? Better than Jess? Worse? Surely they weren’t as close as Jess and Carol were ( _are_ , Jessica tells herself firmly, are), not yet anyway. Well, it feels pretty fucking sucky to Jess. She lost her best friend.

She lost her best friend, but Carol is right there, being all Carol and making everything worse.

“Want me to take the first shift?” Carol calls out.

Jessica shakes her head in lethargy, even though Carol can’t see her with her back turned.

“No,” she says. “I’ll go. You get a shuteye, Kirk.”

She bites her tongue too late, so hard she tastes blood.

 

 

 

So here’s what they don’t tell you:

Everyone knows about the Skrull invasion. Pretty hard to miss, right? Fire raining down from the skies, ugly green aliens cropping up like mushrooms after a depressive bout of rain. So everyone knows that in a blink of an eye, friends, people we trusted, turned out to be alien spies that were leeching on us for years. Everyone knows about the losses – Janet van Dyne, Osborn’s dark reign. Chances are, you know someone who died in the invasion. And most people know about the deeper scars it left. Friendships broken. Trust never regained. Hell, some people still can’t look me in the eye. I get sympathy for that.

What they don’t tell you, what no one ever talks about, is what it’s like to be under.

I was a Skrull prisoner for a year. A year—on Earth, the Avengers broke up and started over again, there was a whole _war_ , and Norman Osborn became a head of a police state… I missed that. And when I talk to people, even now, the people who weren’t there, _Carol_ , they don’t seem to understand that this year wasn’t just lost to me. I spent every long bullshit month in a fucking alien prison. I learned later they kept us on a ship orbiting Earth, so they’d have us _handy_ if they needed to steal some more of our DNA or whatever other horror they thought up this week – and isn’t that a kick in the head, that I was so close the whole time. So close, and I could just as well have been in another galaxy, Bumfuck, Nowhere.

If you were ever to find yourself an alien prisoner—you don’t want it to be Skrulls, trust me. I’ve never been in a Kree prison but I imagine it can’t get much worse than that. Skrulls like to play with their food. And I don’t know what it’s about me, if I have a giant neon sign on my forehead that says “Kick _me_! Retraumatize _this_ loser!” or what, why the fucking head bitchcakes queen chose me of all people, but I was their favorite snack. The mind games they played with us – I say _us_ but it was just me. They told me there were others – _We have our people everywhere. Your governments and your little hero teams have never been functioning as well as now. Aren’t you glad?_ – but while I was under I never saw another human being. I was alone the whole year, just me and the fucking Skrulls, in my head if not there.

Mockingbird was under the longest. They took her to their home world, before it was destroyed. If it were me, if I would’ve had to spend another month, another week with Skrulls—I haven’t talked to Bobbi, how it was for her. None of us who were taken ever talk with each other. It wasn’t something said, that this is not to be talked about, but we all knew anyway.

And you know, I have friends I wouldn’t have made otherwise. I’ve made it big. In some ways, being replaced by a crazy fanatic alien queen was the best thing that ever happened to me.

(Do they miss her? sometimes I think, when it’s five am and I can’t fall asleep and I’m feeling particularly masochistic. Does _Carol_?)

What does it say about me that an alien imposter was better at being me than I ever was?

 

 

 

Nothing’s happened in the last three hours. Jessica’s positioned across the street looking through a high-tech spy-eye and staring at an empty back street and overflowing trash. There’s only one window, a narrow vent too high to comfortably sit at it, and the air circulation is terrible. An array of sensors and radars beep and blink around her, and all of them showing a whole lotta nothing.

If it’s a Hydra cell, they’re either a really good one or a deep, deep sleeper cell. Possibly dead. Or it’s just bad intel.

Carol refuses to go to sleep. You’ve been jetlagged for days, Jessica says. It’s really a job for one person. We can’t even both look through the spy-eye at the same time. Carol hasn’t even taken off her shoes.

She yawns for a nth time, splitting her face like a cat, and the hard set of her shoulders thaws.

“You got this, right?” she says reluctantly, looking at Jess from the corner of her eye but not really looking-looking. Jessica makes her lips form into a smile that’s toeing a fine line between peppy and acerbic. Not that Carol knows what’s out-of-character for her anymore.

“I know how Hydra works,” Jessica says. “Probably better than anyone.”

“You do?” Carol asks. The smile slips from Jessica’s face.

Carol looks to her. There must be something showing in her expression because Carol gives her sheepish “did I just commit a faux-pas?” smile. Jessica hates it.

“I used to know that, didn’t I?” Carol asks rhetorically; there’s an edge of pain in it. It’s a pain. “Of course I knew that. Sorry, I… I’ve been reading the Avengers files but. That’s a lot of information to digest, you know.”

Jessica doesn’t want her to read her Avengers _file_. She wants Carol to know her.

“I’ll remember next time,” Carol says.

They stay like this in a stretching silence that’s becoming more awkward with each second. Jessica balls up a hem of her shirt in one clenched fist.

“I guess you got it then,” Carol says and it sounds like a question. It sounds uncertain, like Carol _never_ is, and Jessica doesn’t know what to do with it. Jess bites her lip. “I think I’ll take that nap.”

She doesn’t move for a beat and then she pulls her sweatshirt over her head. Carol wears a sports bra, one of those funky triangle Pink pieces, but it’s too stretched and laundry-worn to look fancy. Jessica absorbs that knowledge voraciously, half-unconscious of the reason why; of course Carol wears her old sports bra to the ground, of course she wears them white. Under all that bluster she’s always been so square.

Carol’s like Steve this way. Their two captains, they’re sides of the same coin. Carol’s rougher on the outside, wrapping her insecurities and vulnerability in bravado and “I grew up with two brothers” tough girl act. And Steve is the opposite – milky cream top that hides an uncrackable core. But they are so alike, in their convictions, both feet sure on the earth and a dream in their eyes, and Jess is hungrily jealous of that simple steadiness. Jessica’s a balancing act; just like Tony, she adapts, but the problem with flexibility is that it leaves you with no solid ground. Nothing lasts and everything is in a constant process of becoming, so you don’t have anything. Maybe that’s why Jess has never particularly liked Tony – he reminds her too much of all the parts of herself she’d rather forget.

It wasn’t so long ago when Carol and her were sitting down with Steve and Tony, almost perfect mirrors.

Jess is familiar with Carol’s muscles, how they fit around her like a second ribcage. She’s seen Carol’s body enough times – hazards of the job, she supposes. Or perks, depends on how you look at it. She doesn’t think to turn away her gaze; Carol might not remember how they used to be, how physical with each other, that Carol’s hand sometimes felt like Jessica’s own limb, but Carol’s military. She’s used to no privacy. That’s what Jess would tell herself if she thought to justify it. But in truth, she doesn’t; looking feels as natural as breathing.

Carol’s Pink bra that might’ve been cute once is threadbare-thin, the flimsy white cotton especially translucent. Jess can see small, pink nipples poking through it. Nothing like Jessica’s musty peach full moons. Carol’s nipples are pink.

Jess is hot all over, quick and sudden like a pot brought to boiling. Her skin pulls with a sour crawling feeling, like sweat but more visceral, waves pouring out of her. Carol looks up at Jess, sweatshirt still halfway around her elbows, and screws up her face as if she’s trying to keep in a spike of disgust pooling in her mouth.

Jessica clamps down on her pheromones like hitting hard on the breaks, and thinks _fuck fuck fuck_.

 

 

 

My philosophy in life is to never look back.

My S.H.I.E.L.D. sometime-therapist says I’m not coping. Well, screw him. Are you a product of a freak accident slash genetic experiments that made you half-spider? Have you been a little kid when you went into a coma for a decade and missed out on all your growing-up, a chance for a normal life? Have you then been brainwashed by a Nazi terrorist organization? Thought you died and erased your existence from memory of everyone you know? Lost your powers, the only thing that you ever had? Made a deal with the devil to get them back and got impersonated by an evil alien queen for a year for your trouble? Have your closest person in the world forget who you are? _Screw_ you. This is me coping.

So I don’t look back. I’ve had to rebuild my entire world so many times that sometimes it feels it’s enough for a few lifetimes – hero’s lot, I suppose. So I don’t think about it; new life is new life and that’s all there is to it. On a good day, I can pretend that Hydra and all of my fucked-up origin was just a bad acid trip, and almost believe it. I don’t look back. This is how you survive.

My problem is, I got too attached to my place in life, over the years. Stupid. Should’ve known it’d be yanked from under me just when I got comfortable.

I’m being dramatic. Well, sue me. I never got through puberty. When I woke up, instead of teenage hormones I got saddled with pheromones. I figure I’m owed a little drama. Still—Carol is _not_ my entire life – there’s the Avengers, and somehow I’ve carved out a corner in this world I can call my own. Well, an alien bitch impersonator did. At least she’s done all the heavy-lifting.

Not looking back. Unless to crack a joke about it. I’m so full of bullshit.

Since past is past – bad acid trip, bad acid trip, bad acid trip – I come from nowhere. I don’t grow roots. Try not to get attached. They say people with abandonment issues have two reactions to trauma – they either attach to anyone and everyone or never form any meaningful connections. Most of the time it means people think I’m a bitch, because I keep them at distance and can let go easily, but that’s just because I have to check myself ‘cause when I fall… I fall hard. I’m lucky that way.

It’s funny, and so transparent in the hindsight, that the only people I ever let myself form long-lasting connections with were women. Funny, because I did everything in my power to repel them – between the pheromones, and the arch aloofness, and the porn star costume. Isn’t it said that women hate attractive stuck-up bitches? God, I’m such a cliché. I’m the bitchy cheerleader – except that I never got to go to high school and I doubt I’d ever be a cheer squad material – who picks on another girl because she has a big gay crush. Or, you know, repels her with pheromones. Same difference.

And in hindsight it’s so painfully obvious that I’ve never managed to hold on to a man for long. I tried to do it, I really did; life was good for once and I thought I might get a shot at a relationship, my first serious relationship, with Clint. _Clint!_ I’m hopeless. We were a disaster together, and at time I thought—well, I don’t know what I’m doing! I don’t know how to _be_ with people. You can blame a lot on abandonment issues, but there’s a line. Clint was a good friend. Clint is a good friend. But have I ever seen a future for us together, for real? Maybe that was the point. And have I ever wanted any man, so much that it makes my heart ache, I want him so fucking bad?

Carol makes my heart ache. Of course I’d figure it out _now_. I love her so badly I can’t imagine myself without her, like I’m back being a child in a body of a grown woman waking up to a strange and scary world. Fuck everyone else – Carol is _home_.

That’s how I know I ruined everything.

 

 

 

It’s been quiet this past hour. People coming and going past the suspected Hydra front, a street cleaner sweeping a curb at the corner of the block, and dim windows on the opposite side of the street, not even a blink of a light or movement. Maybe it’s not a Hydra base after all.

Jess almost wishes for a swarm of green-and-red fascist Christmas army to burst through the doors lasers blazing and their terrible seagull chant. Or like a homeless grandma with really terrible pigtails. _Something_ to occupy her attention.

Something to take her attentions outside of this sleeping-breath filled room. Jess finds herself humming in rhythm to Carol’s exhaling and inhaling, and has to dig her fingernails so deep she punctures the skin over her ankle. She doesn’t really have much in a way of superhuman senses, some augmented hearing, but it’s a cage of a room with just a tiny window that only opens halfway and after hours the air is full of Carol and her sleep-heavy scent. It smells like clean sweat and sporty active deodorant, and Jess was never big on smells – she can tell a bad smell from a good one, but she’s always thought people who claim they can detect ingredients of something just by smelling it are full of crap – but Carol’s scent has sunk deep into her skin cells, mingled with her own, and is never going to leave her.

She glances back at Carol’s sleeping figure anxiously, as if she was going to look back at her and see Carol sitting up and glaring at her. But no; Carol is bundled up on her side, the blanket kicked down and tangled between her toned legs, her choppy blond hair sticking every-which way. Carol’s hand is curled into her face, bitten nail almost grazing her half-open pink lips, pink like her nipples visible through the white bra she’s sleeping in, and it’s a sight Jess knows well, from many bed-sharing and sleepovers they’ve had over the years. It could be Jessica has only woke up to go to the bathroom and she’ll just slide back into their bed, and Carol might hum and curl into Jessica’s shoulder, sleep-warm and slick with sweat, and Jess might brush her unruly hair from her face, and maybe brush Carol’s lips with the tip of her finger, and she’ll close her eyes and breathe in Carol’s air and imagine what would it be like, going to bed every night and waking up in the morning to Carol.

It’s disgusting. You’re disgusting, Jessica thinks. You don’t have the right to think about her that way. Carol’s nice to you because she thinks she can fake it out and if she pretends long enough everything will fall back into place. You’re a stranger to her. She doesn’t know you anymore. You’re just a creepy stranger who usurps themselves the right to her, to her body, her affections. How does it differ from a predatory creep who leers at strange girls and imagines them naked? You’re nothing but a predator.

Focus on the mission. If only there was something for her to _surveil_. She’s sitting there useless staring at nothing and the only thing to observe is her every gross sensation.

You’re a trained superhuman, she reminds herself. It’s just like controlling your pheromones. Well, _shit_ ; Jessica was always terrible at that. She’s always been terrible at controlling her willful body.

Her skin is tingling. It starts between her legs and up her arms and it takes Jess a moment to parse it’s not her body. A second later she can hear it, like low-frequency drumming.

Carol flutters open one sticky eye and props herself on her elbow. Jessica uncrosses her legs and is pushing her ass up.

“What the…” Carol murmurs.

Then there’s a sound like earth breaking and everything explodes.

Jess twists mid-air, trying to get ahold of Carol, when she collides with her body, hard. She’s pushed to the wall with a cement-block of slender muscles and Jessica scrambles at Carol flanks, frantic, _What are you doing_ …

“I can take more damage than you,” Carol shouts over the noise. Jessica freezes – _she knows? she_ cares _?_ – and stops struggling. Of course she cares. She’s a hero.

A beat and it all quiets. Jess peers over Carol’s arm and sees that the room hasn’t exploded after all – but there’s a deep teethy crack running across the middle like after an earthquake. The mattress is wedged in the rift; Jessica feels herself sliding into Carol. The floor is tilted.

Then, under the dust, you can hear familiar shouting.

“I guess we found Hydra’s hideout,” Jess whispers.

Carol leans back, but her thighs stay propped on both sides of Jess’s body. Her face is so close. _This thing you’re doing with my face? It’s weird and I want it to stop._ God, it feels ages ago. A different era. She wants Carol to touch her. She wants to trail the pad of her thumb along Carol’s soft lower lip, feel it give in and open. She wants…

Carol sways closer and Jessica stops breathing, and then Carol catches herself just a few inches from her lips, something questioning in her eyes, something asking _do we…?_ Jessica swallows down her heart before it swells so much she knows it will burst.

“Come on,” Jessica says quietly, because someone has to say something. “Let’s kick some Nazi ass.”

Carol smiles at her, a curl of a lip, and it’s her Cap’n-means-Business smile. Carol’s ass-kicking glee doesn’t fail to make Jess reciprocate with a faint grin of her own, even now; it used to be their partners in (fighting) crime smile, for a while, but Carol was a hero long before Jess, long before she got powers, and she’ll continue to be a hero long after Jess. For that moment, they are a team again. Even if it’s just a random stake-out duty and Carol doesn’t remember, they’re a unit.

“Let’s go, Spock,” Carol says and her voice hesitates only a fraction on the last word.

A fraction, and it makes all the difference.

 

 

 

I’m an overthinker. That’s what I do. It’s a superhero thing. Or a spy thing. Or a sometime double slash triple agent slash it’s-complicated thing. You can’t help but always be running a thousand different scenarios and what-ifs in your head. But thing is, at some point you have to make a call. Make a decision and stick by it – it’s a hard skill but you can’t survive long on the job if you can’t do it. Maybe that’s why I can’t stand soap operas. Too much push-and-pull drama.

I’m not going to be a source of any more drama in Carol’s life. I’ll be her friend if she wants me and be what she needs me to be, like I did before, and _stop_ with the pity party. Carol’s there and alive – that should be enough. It has to be enough.

(So that thing about sticking with your choice? Well, it doesn’t stop the what-if machine from running. Oh, I’m good at shoving it aside and trying my damndest to do what needs to be done. But concurrently somewhere at the back of my head, there’s a part of me that keeps dissecting every single thought and element that makes up what I am. I always end up back on the lab table. Or pinned down under heavy glass and a fluorescent lamp, like an insect in an exhibition box. Or arachnid. Whatever. I wonder, what if, what if, what if I just walked away, what if I _could_ , what if I were enough to save Carol’s mind somehow, what if I took a chance and… But some things I’m better off not knowing. Probably. I’m just gonna have to learn to live with it.)


End file.
